At Britvic, we strive to be the most dynamic soft drinks company, creating a better tomorrow. We offer consumers a range of family favourite and global premium brands. We exist to help people enjoy life’s everyday moments.
With a heritage dating back to the 1930s, our business was built on bringing an affordable source of vitamins to consumers at a time when diets lacked important nutrients. Today, the health challenges facing our consumers may have changed but we still believe we have an important role to play. An average Britvic soft drinks now contains only 16.5kcals per serve – that’s less than half an apple, and a fall of 21% vs. the year before! 99.5% of our own brands in GB are below the sugar levy.
We are also the first branded UK soft drinks company to sign up to front of pack traffic light labelling to help consumers make their own healthy, balanced, informed choices.
We want the communities in which we operate to thrive and, through our community support programmes, we offer a variety of mechanisms by which our employees can support their communities including paid volunteering days, matched fundraising and drinks donations. As part of our ongoing commitment to addressing societal health issues that affect both our consumers and employees, and we recently announced our three year partnership with Diabetes UK.
Embracing also diversity underpins our commitment to providing equal opportunities. We codify this through our Equality and Diversity Policy, our Diversity & Inclusion Strategy and our values.
Britvic also plays an active role in promoting the growth, development and understanding of our business and the wider industry, and we are proud to work alongside and support a wide variety of relevant trade bodies and associations in our key markets. Last year we played a key role in a number of associations, including sitting on the relevant boards and executive councils of organisations including the Food and Drink Federation, and the British Soft Drinks Association.
As a soft drinks business, our long-term success depends on our ability to source our ingredients and raw materials, which in turn depends upon a stable healthy natural environment. The climate crisis and the inefficient way in which resources are consumed have hit the headlines this year and governments, business leaders and communities at large are waking up to the fact that something needs to change, and more must be done to tackle the environmental challenges we face. We are committed to playing our part.
Here are a just a few of the things we are doing:
Factory Sustainability
We ensure that all our factory waste is diverted from landfill. 100% electricity we buy to power our factories comes from renewable sources.
Carbon reduction
Thanks to a targeted £240M investment in our supply chain, we have reduced our carbon footprint by 21%. Last year we also signed up to Science Based Targets, and committed to a 50% reduction in our direct footprint by 2025, and to become a carbon neutral company by 2025.
Food Waste
In January, we signed up to WRAP’s Food Waste Reduction Roadmap.
In regards to packaging, we’re already proud to say that 100% of all our cans and bottles are recyclable, and we were founding signatory to the UK Plastics Pact, committing us stretching targets by 2025. We have a passion for ensuring we only put great designed packaging on the market, and that that great packaging never becomes waste.
To achieve this, our sustainable Packaging strategy is focused around the 4Rs – “Reduce”, “Recycle”, “Reframe”, “Reinvent.”
To “Reduce”, we are committed to minimizing packaging weight per serve – for example in 2020, we are committed to reducing another 500 tonnes of PET plastic use, on top of the thousands of tonnes we have already lightweighted. We have also switched all our cans from steel to aluminium, saving 8,000 tonnes of packaging weight per year.
To “Recycle”, we are working hard to ensure that all our packaging is easily and widely recyclable, and to accelerate our use of recycled content. On glass, aluminium and card, we are in a great place already. We recently announced £5M investment with our partner Esterpet enables us to scale up our use of rPET (recycled PET) quickly -this year we’ll get two of our brands to 100% rPET status. We’ve also started to roll out 50% recycled content on our case shrinks.
To “Reframe”, we’re committed to deploying the power of our brands to inspire and inform Britain to get recycling. We’ll be proud supporters of the new OPRL scheme, and ensure that 100% of all our trade and consumer advertisements carry a strong, consistent recycling “nudge” message – we are the first UK soft drinks company to make that commitment.
To “Reinvent”, we’re committed to finding new ways to make packaging even better, and last month announced a transformational partnership with BP Infina to accelerate the commercialisation of enhance recycling technology. We are committed to a future possibilities “beyond the bottle”, to make huge reductions in our packaging and carbon footprint. Specifically, we’ll be leveraging our existing strength in dispense (bag-in-box) and flavoured concentrates to do that. First of the blocks is our exciting London Essence Company Fresh premium tonic on dispense, which we are really excited about!
